Opal is not only the debut album by the Munich band collective Embryo, centred on drummer and percussionist Christian Burchard. In the late 1960s, the band met at krautrock and soon opened itself up to world music. Opal can therefore also be read as a kind of mission statement. After all, the remarkable openness and genre-crossing approach that would become typical of Embryo are already laid out on this album – even if the jazz- and blues-rock foundation of their psychedelic sound shines through more clearly on Opal than on later releases.
This early sound is represented, for instance, by »Revolution«, one of the album’s grooviest pieces: with driving bass and free-jazz-like horns. For all its expressivity, the dominant saxophone does not sound like unleashed fire-spitting, but keeps returning to a motif that serves as an anchor.
The more experimental, psychedelic side of the album is represented by the spherical track »People from Out the Space«. In it, the hypnotic percussion groove and driving bongos already hint at the world-music influences that would later become a central element of Embryo’s sonic aesthetic – and, beyond that, give the piece a cosmic, »out there« quality.
